Wednesday, 3 June 2009

Oh no, not again....I've left it too long and now the backlog of things to tell you has been seeming far too scary to ever even attempt it...but...it's got to be done....So here goes -well, in brief - yes I went down to see the queen, and stood in the wrong place, curtseyed at the wrong time (and in the wrong way, apparently!) and called her the wrong thing, but apart from that it was a great experience!Since my last post I've also been recording with Sting, doing my own gigs, leading a workshop day at the Yehudi Menuhin school in Surrey, spending some family time cooking sausages in a frying pan over the fire beside the river near our house and marking various things at the Folk & Trad music degree course at Newcastle Uni (and lots of other things too, but I just wanted to come on and do a quick catch-up post so that it didn't feel quite so daunting next time...!)Oh - and today I've just come back from a rehearsal with Psappha down in Derbyshire for our performance of Sir Peter Maxwell Davies' piece Kettletoft Inn, which we're playing at the St Magnus Festival in Orkney later this month. It is very strange for me to go and rehearse, from the written music, once, with people I've never played with before, and won't again until the day of the concert...but that's the way it works it seems, and I have to say that it was great to do it without a conductor and just work directly with the actual players (and of course classical musicians are amazing at reading and interpreting written music on extremely tight time schedules, and the Psappha players did seem particularly open minded, and didn't give me too much of a hard time about my unsuppressable inclination to play melodies my own way and not to bother too much about what's written down ('the dots')...which must have made their lives a bit more difficult) I look forward to playing it with them again.It's been beautiful weather recently. Really, really wonderful, and long overdue.It's made everyone that I know happier - I hope you've all been enjoying it too.All for now,kathryn x